Web3 Growth Marketing: How to Adjust to Bull/Bear Cycles

Success in Web3 marketing looks drastically different in a bear market vs. a bull market. The two biggest factors of Web3 marketing cycles are:

• Innovation
• Price action

You can't control price action, but you can directly influence how much innovation happens on-chain. Innovation directly impacts price action in a bull market.

That's why people say put your head down and build during a bear market.

What you build in a bear market, from a hard tech and marketing funnel perspective, will determine your success or failure in a bear market.

Let's explore how Web3 marketing dynamics change during bull/bear cycles and how you can excel no matter what.

First off, what do I consider Web3?

Simply put, it's the natural evolution of the internet into decentralized communities.

Web3 represents all the infrastructure that allows us to do this:

• Crypto
• Blockchain.
• NFTs
• DAOs
• Exchanges

New technologies will spring up during a bear market that adds to the Web3 definition. It's constantly evolving, and Web3 as a term is brand new.

Some people think Web3 is marketing jargon, but I like it because it's a simple way to give people a visual of the underlying tech without scaring them away. Additionally, it's less threatening than the term crypto, which causes a lot of mental friction because of the underlying technology.

In 2017 when I told people about crypto, their brains would immediately die once I tried to explain blockchain technology.

Web3 paints a picture of creativity and upside. Crypto paints a picture of gambling on meme coins and rug pulls.

A few simple Web3 marketing rules.

Bull cycles = easier to get results.

This means your marketing can suck, and you can get exceptional results because people are in ape mode.

Bear cycles = harder to get results.

This means your marketing can be epic but without results, because people are in fear mode.

I wrote about marketing cycles in crypto from an Ethereum perspective. You can read more about that here.

However, bull/bear cycles affect every chain the same way.

So how do you adjust?

Put your head down and build your marketing funnel during a bear cycle, and you will be rewarded during a bull cycle when price action returns. The more innovation that happens on-chain, the better your price action will be during a bull cycle.

What's Innovation?

Innovation = New ideas.

It also means the practical implementation of ideas that result in introducing new goods or services or improving in offering goods or services. Innovation compounds leading to positive price action. Positive price action sparks organic marketing.

Innovation leads to new apps launched, which attract new users. New apps spark the imagination of new founders who launch new apps and bring new engineers to build on-chain.

Which again leads to cool new ideas.

For example, Ethereum ICOs.

ICOs led to:

• More founders
• More engineers
• More apps
• More users
• More liquidity
• Increase in price

As price increases, so does PR, which draws in more users. Therefore, marketing during this time is the highest impact.

ICOs laid the foundation to bring marketers and creators to Web3. The term Web3 didn't exist until this cycle, and most creators didn't want anything to do with crypto.

However, NFTs led to creators having a light bulb moment, and suddenly, they had a suite of tools to scale their communities and artistic pursuits.

But ICOs were just speculation, right?

Wrong! This speculative price action has a profound positive impact on the Web3 ecosystem.

When the price goes up due to speculation, more and more people buy, driving the price up further.

Which does the following.

• Price action = organic PR and news stories
• Organic PR and news = more buyers
• More buyers = more investors
• More investors = more builders
• More builders = more innovation?

Eventually, this bubble pops:

• Speculators scatter
• Founders, devs, creators leave
• People get liquidated and lose money
• Crypto is suddenly a scam
• An army of "I told you so" people come out of the woodwork
• Hedge funds wait until a bottom forms to deploy
• No bids/buys

Attention and DAUs drain after the bubble pops. After that, however, the people who made money seek to allocate and position themselves for the next bull cycle.

VCs invest in founders and builders. Builders build. Creators create. Price action goes sideways. Funds and retail traders lick their wounds and prepare for the next run. Some never come back and call it a scam.

And then it starts all over again.

So how do you adjust to the bull/bear cycles?

People underestimate the positive impact innovation has on-chain to future growth marketing efforts. Remember, innovation means new ideas. Now more than ever before, we have new ideas about Web3 circulating on multiple blockchains. So whatever you do now will be amplified during the next bull cycle.

Web3 marketers were born during this last bull cycle which adds a creative ingredient that was missing during previous cycles.

Bringing marketers on-chain opens the door to even more mass adoption because they have the ability to demystify the underlying technology.

Right now, the market is artificially held down by historic inflation and quantitative tightening. It's like the federal reserve threw a wet blanket over all of crypto – How do you mount a rally with a wet blanket?

You can't and must let the tightening cycle play out.

That doesn't mean you should sit around and do nothing during the bear cycle. However, one thing will set you up for success when the macro turns around – What's that one thing?

Triple down on organic marketing and scale these efforts as quickly as possible

This includes blogs, email blasts, videos, spaces, substack, virtual events, Twitter, and LinkedIn posts.

Use this time to hone in and fine-tune your messaging.

Put your head down and do the above; the bull cycle will be back in no time.?

Were you expecting some secret growth hack? I can definitely help you with those as well. However, for that to work more effectively, you need to ramp up organic marketing efforts and build trust first.

What about paid marketing?

Indeed, the cost of paid marketing efforts decreases in a bear market. However, the cost to get new users increases, so the savings are negligible.

So, if you are going strictly for awareness, then paid to advertise is the way to go.

However, paid works best when your marketing funnel is set up well, and you have more organic content out there. Paid is not a shortcut through marketing. The more precise your branding is and the more content you have out there, the better your paid advertising will work.

So focus on ramping up organic first and once you have that working well, go back and ramp up paid efforts.

Where we're at today

it appears we're just settling into the bear market. The only clear catalyst that will spark another bull cycle is the Bitcoin halving in about 2 yrs. Additionally, most funds are parked in cash until after mid-terms.

This is the perfect time to polish up your messaging and ramp up organic marketing efforts!

It's quiet and much easier to focus on content.